Bananas are harvested in the tropical regions such as Central and South America for consumption in consuming regions, such as North America. Consuming regions have different packing specifications. For example, North American retailers of bananas specify the shipment of bananas on standard GMA (Grocery Manufacturers Association) pallets with a nominal footprint of 48″×40″. North American retailers further specify that bananas be packaged in increments of 40 lbs. net product weight delivered to retail distribution centers. Bananas are typically shipped in refrigerated intermodal containers via container ships from ports in South and Central America, then over roads to distributions centers.
The industry-standard method for packaging bananas for shipment to North American retailers has been to pack in corrugated cardboard boxes that have been tailored to this application. Corrugated boxes for bananas are of a 2-piece construction with outside dimensions of about 19.7″ (50 cm) in length×15.75″ (40 cm) in width×9.69″ (24.6 cm) in height. The 2-piece boxes include a bottom and a top cover that telescopes the full height of the bottom to contribute to stacking strength due to the resultant double-wall construction. Corrugated boxes weigh approximately 3 lbs. each.
Bananas are cut from stems into clusters of 4 to 9 banana fingers; each cluster having 2 rows of bananas referred to as the inner whirl on the concave side of the cluster and the outer whirl on the convex side of the cluster. Boxes are typically packed with 15 to 17 clusters per box to meet the net weight specification for major North American retailers. These clusters are packed in 3 or 4 lines or rows of fruit. Packing of the bananas causes flexible boxes to bulge in all directions.
In the past, attempts have been made to duplicate the dimensions of the corrugated box with a rigid, 5-sided, open-top Reusable Plastic Containers (RPCs). The RPC include a base coupled to four walls, two sidewalls and two endwalls. Typically, RPCs are collapsible. Collapsible RPCs provide a “collapsed” arrangement and an “erected” arrangement. The sidewalls and endwalls are connected to the base by hinges which allows the walls to attain the collapsed arrangement where the walls are folded onto the base and achieve an orientation generally parallel to the base, and allows the walls attain the erected arrangement by raising the walls to an orientation generally perpendicular to the base. A latching system including a latch and corresponding stop are used to couple the sidewalls to adjacent endwalls and thereby maintain the erected configuration of the container.
In the past, attempts made to duplicate the dimensions of the corrugated box with a more rigid, 5-sided, open top Reusable Plastic Containers (RPCs) have proven to be unsuccessful in shipping bananas.
Rigid RPCs with 4 walls and a base are designed to handle stacking loads transferred through the walls and base of containers to the pallet with a safety margin to achieve many years of life. The rigid nature of the RPC exacerbates packing damage and damage associated with transporting the requisite quantity of bananas.
To address the weight restrictions on the container and to reduce the amount of packing damage, RPC containers have been made to be more flexible, more in the manner of a corrugated cardboard box than conventional rigid RPCs. To achieve greater flexibility, the thicknesses of walls have been reduced, and rigidizing features such as ribs in the walls have been reduced in number and positioned to allow greater flexibility of the walls.
While such design choices address concerns such as weight and damage to fruit, they present challenges in maintaining sufficient integrity of the erected boxes.
Additional complications of container design arise when containers are to be used with automatic washing systems. Known systems allow for washing with jets of water and scrubbing in a conventional manner, and frequently include apparatus to automatically collapse the walls of the containers without manual operation of the latches that maintain the boxes in an erected arrangement. Automatic collapsing occurs with application of an impulse force (e.g., a force generated by swinging of an arm having a weight attached to an end of the arm) onto a wall of the container to cause the latch to fail without undue damage to the latch. This manner of collapsing a container is commonly referred to as slap down or knockdown.